How to Be Good (24 page)

Suddenly she starts singing ‘Getting to Know You' from
The King and I
. I am blushing now. I can feel the blood pumping through every vein in my face and neck, and for the first time I wonder whether the nice lady is actually demented. It is only fair to point out, however, that not everyone is as agonized as I am by the performance. Some of us are waggling our heads and smiling, and it is clear that
The King and I
is closer to our collective heart than ‘Get With the Wicked'.

‘This is a good church, isn't it, Mum?' Molly whispers, and I nod with as much enthusiasm as I can access.

‘Is this the one we'll be coming to every week?'

I shrug. Who knows? It is not easy to see how I might become a committed Christian through listening to a madwoman singing selections from musicals at me, but then again, I never really anticipated sharing my house with men called names like GoodNews and Monkey.

‘I know that song is from
The King and I
,' says the nice lady, ‘but it could have been written about God. He wants to get to know you. And that's why He is not interested in you being artificially good, because that prevents Him from discovering you.'

Ha. This is more like it. ‘Artificially good'. I like that phrase, and I will throw it in somebody's face at the first available opportunity. This is why I have moved out: because of the artificiality of David's behaviour, which prevents God from knowing him. In fact, David may well end up going to hell, paradoxically and ironically, because God will not have a clue who he really is. I am coming round to the Christian viewpoint. The nice lady is arguing that doing nothing – and anyway, I don't do nothing, because I am a doctor, a good person, but my goodness is organic and natural, rather than artificial – is better, more holy, than doing something. I decide, on the spot, to let God into my heart, in the hope that my new-found faith can somehow be used as a vicious weapon in the marital war. It is true that not everyone discovers the Lord in this way; some would argue that it is distinctly unChristian, in fact, to become a convert in the hope that it might really upset somebody. But God, famously, moves in mysterious ways.

The sermon is followed by a reading that I find so pertinent that it is all I can do to stop myself leaping out of my pew and punching the air. The reading is given by one of the very few men in the congregation with the puff to get up the steps to the pulpit; when he has recovered from his exertions, he launches in to one of St Paul's Letters to the Corinthians. It's famous, this reading, and I've heard it many times before (how? where?), and because I think I know it, I drift off. The word ‘charity' reels me back in. ‘ “Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up”,' the man with puff says. Hurrah for St Paul! Right on! Vaunting and puffing! Puffing and vaunting! You want any of that, you should come round to Webster
Road, which has become a Puffers and Vaunters Social Club! Why have I never heard this stuff properly before?

I attempt to think about all this, and how it can best be used for maximum damage, by gazing across the church and into what I hope is a holy space, but I end up simply staring at someone I hadn't noticed before: a man of around my age, with my nose and my complexion, wearing my husband's old leather jacket. I am looking at my brother. My brother!

My first reaction – and this says something about the state of contemporary Anglicanism, and also why I suspect my new-found enthusiasm for the Church is likely to be short-lived – is to feel terribly sad for him; I really hadn't known things were this desperate. I watch him for a while, and manage to convince myself that the desperation is etched on his face. He clearly isn't listening to a word that the nice lady is saying, and at one stage he emits a sigh and props his head up on his fist. I nudge Molly and point, and after she has spent an abortive couple of minutes failing to attract his attention, she crosses the church and joins him. He does a double-take, kisses her, then looks round and locates me, and we exchange baffled smiles.

The nice mad lady is giving communion now, and the congregation gets shakily to its collective feet and begins to shuffle forward. The commotion, or what passes for a commotion here, allows me to scoop up the members of my family scattered around the church and lead them out.

‘Hello.' When we get outside I kiss Mark on the cheek and look at him quizzically.

‘It's like bumping into someone in a brothel, isn't it?' he says.

‘Is it?'

‘Yeah. I mean, I'm mortified that you've caught me. But then, you shouldn't really be here either, should you?'

‘I've got a child.'

‘That's an excuse for going to
Toy Story
2
, not church.'

‘We're going every week,' says Molly. ‘It was great, wasn't it?'

‘Well, Uncle Mark can take you next week. Do you want to come back for coffee?'

‘Yeah. Thanks.'

Mark and I walk to the car – thirty seconds, it takes us! – in silence, listening to Molly rapping ‘1–2–3–4 Get With the Wicked' and skipping along to the rhythm in her head. Neither Mark nor I are amused or delighted by her display, even though she is being relatively amusing and delightful, if you like that sort of thing; and I remember that when I was pregnant with Tom, I used to watch other parents reacting with either blankness or irritation to their children's childishness and wondering whether I would ever be able to take it for granted like that. I couldn't imagine it. The heady preparation of hope and hormones that courses through you during pregnancy had kidded me into believing I would always, always want to cry whenever my unborn child did anything joyful. But it just gets beaten out of you – not by the kids, but by life. You want to cry, but you're too busy trying not to cry about something else, and this morning I'm trying not to cry about the state of my brother.

Mark looks old, much older than I remember him looking: sadness has gouged some extra lines around his eyes and mouth, and there is some grey in his Sunday-morning stubble. He's usually clean-shaven, so allowing the grey to poke out like that seems significant somehow – not so much as if he's accepted the ageing process with dignity, but more that he has given up, that there's no point in reaching for the shaving foam because shaving is the first move of a game he's lost too many times already. Maybe I'm being silly and melodramatic, and maybe if I'd caught him coming out of a nightclub (or a brothel) looking like this the stubble and the weariness would prompt an entirely different interpretation, but I haven't caught him coming out of a nightclub. I've caught him coming out of a church, and I know him well enough to presume that this is not a good sign.

‘So?'

‘So what?'

‘Was that a one-off?'

‘A two-off.'

‘Twice in a row? Or twice ever?'

‘In a row.'

‘And how's it going?'

‘You were there. I mean, she's, you know . . . She's one wafer short of a communion, isn't she?'

‘So why go back? Why not go to a different one?'

‘I'm afraid that if I go to a good one I'll get sucked in. No chance of that there.'

‘That's the logic of a depressive.'

‘Well. Yeah. It would be, wouldn't it?'

I park outside the house and we go inside. GoodNews and David are at the kitchen table hunched over a piece of paper.

‘This is my brother Mark. I bumped into him in church. Mark, this is DJ GoodNews.'

They shake hands, and GoodNews gives Mark a long, quizzical stare that clearly unnerves him.

‘Can you both shove off now?' I say. ‘Mark and I want to talk privately.' David shoots me a loving, wounded look, but they gather their stuff together and go.

‘Can I listen?' says Molly.

‘No. Bye.'

‘That bloke was at the party,' Mark says. ‘Who is he?'

‘GoodNews? My husband's spiritual healer. He lives with us now. With them, anyway. I live in a bedsit round the corner. Not that the kids know.'

‘Oh. Right. So. Anything else happening?'

‘That's about it.'

I tell him about the last few weeks with as much economy as he permits, and while I am talking it strikes me that if anyone needed the sadness drawing out of him it is Mark.

‘How about you?'

‘Oh, you know.' He shrugs.

‘What do I know?'

‘I've been to church twice in the last fortnight. That sort of sums it up.'

He doesn't mean that this is the sum total of his activity; he means that he has reached the end of his tether. Mark takes drugs, goes to see bands, swears a lot, hates Conservatives, has periods of
promiscuity. If, on meeting him for the first time, you were asked to name one thing that he didn't do, you would almost certainly choose churchgoing.

‘How did it start?'

‘I was driving to see you. I was feeling low, and I thought the kids would cheer me up, and it was Sunday morning, and . . . I dunno. I just saw the church, and it was the right time, and I went in. What about you?'

‘I wanted to be forgiven.'

‘For what?'

‘For all the shitty things I do,' I say.

Mark only just made my guilt-list, and when I look at him now that seems almost laughably complacent. He's a very unhappy man, maybe even suicidal, and I didn't have a clue. All the lonely people . . . At least we know where they come from: Surrey. That's where Mark and I come from, anyway.

‘You don't do anything shitty.'

‘Thank you. But I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.'

‘Fucking hell. Glad I came here.'

I give him a cup of coffee, and he lights a cigarette – he gave up ten years ago – and I look for Monkey's saucer ashtray while he tells me about his hopeless job, and his hopeless love life, and all the stupid mistakes he's made, and how he has started to hate everyone and everything, including his nearest and dearest, which is how come he has ended up listening to a woman singing lines from
The King and I
at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning.

 

GoodNews has picked it all up already, of course. We sit down to a hastily assembled ploughman's lunch, and without invitation he wades into the stagnant, foul-smelling pond that is Mark's life.

‘I'm sorry if you think I'm being a bit, you know,' he begins. ‘But when we shook hands . . . Man, you nearly took my arm off.'

‘I'm sorry,' says Mark, apologetic but understandably surprised: I saw the whole incident, and it seemed like a pretty straightforward
handshake to me; at no stage did it look as though anyone would end up with a permanent disability. ‘Did I hurt you?'

‘In here you hurt me.' GoodNews taps his heart. ‘Because it hurts when I know fellow human beings are in trouble. And if ever a hand was shouting for help it was yours.'

Mark cannot help it: he has a quick look, back and front, to see if there is any evidence of this manual distress.

‘Nah, you won't see anything there. It's not a, like a visible thing. I mean, I feel it physically. Ow. You know?' And he winces and massages his hand, to demonstrate the pain that Mark so recently caused him. ‘But sadness is a right sod for keeping itself hidden away. A right sod. Gotta come out sometime, though, and it's pouring out of you.'

‘Oh,' says Mark.

The children munch on relentlessly. It depresses me that they are so accustomed to conversations of this kind that they cannot even be bothered to gape.

‘I'm sure Mark would rather talk about something else,' I say hopefully.

‘Perhaps he would,' says GoodNews. ‘But I'm not sure it'd be a good idea. Do you know what you're sad about, Mark?'

‘Well . . .'

‘As far as I can tell, it's mostly in the area of relationships and work,' says GoodNews, apparently uninterested in anything Mark has to say. ‘And it's starting to get serious.'

‘How serious?' says David, concerned.

‘You know,' says GoodNews, nodding meaningfully at the children.

‘There's not much point in Mark being here, is there?' I say. ‘Why don't you two sort it out between you?'

‘Oh, we can't do that,' says GoodNews. ‘In the end, Mark knows more about how unhappy he is than either of us.'

‘Really?' I use a sarcastic tone of voice, and make a sarcastic face, and I even attempt a sarcastic posture, but it's no use.

‘Oh, sure. I only get the vaguest sense of the causes.'

‘I'd say work and relationships just about covered it,' Mark says.

‘Do you want to do anything about it?' David asks him.

‘Well, yeah, I wouldn't mind.'

‘GoodNews rubs it out of you,' Molly says matter-of-factly. ‘His hands go all hot and then you're not sad any more. I'm not sad about Grandma Parrot, or Poppy, or Mummy's baby that died.'